Well, let me put this in perspective for you.

The masses are the ones who make up the bulk of the playerbase. If your community has 100,000 people, and 60,000 of them make posts about wanting the entire game nerfed in a certain way  --whether or not it's a good idea-- you either do it or risk losing 60% of your playerbase overnight.

It's not like devs just read the forums, see what people are talking about, and then go do it. They have to watch the majority, and that's what matters. Sure, people hate it when PvE is changed due to PvP, or vice versa. If you don't like it, then you better speak up and get everyone you know to speak up, because they're *always* going to go with the larger faction.

 That's the way it works in everything. Even in politics you never seem to hear about anything middle of the road. This health care debate is a perfect example of the screamers getting all the attention. DAoC was great when it first came out. Over time some things were overpowered but the vocal minority slowly began getting their voice heard and the bs started instead of fixing the things that should have been fixed. The AOE casters wanted to run into the midst of battle and lay waste to tanks, but being casters they died quickly. Rather than wait for the right time or playing their toons the way they were designed to be played they cried so hard that mythic decided to add buffs into the game that basically changed the entire game into a ranged battle where tanks were laregly irrelevant. Armsmen went from being devastators to laughed at. Pallys could still be useful at times but why bother when another sorc would be so much better?

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Originally posted by Varny
God forums for mmos with PVP are some of the whiniest out there. Just people whining who want things their way to make them better and yet developers seem to listen to them and ruin the game for everyone else just so they can be happy. Star Wars Galaxies is a great example of a game ruined for the constant nerfs and buffs that went on. Just as one profession got buffed everyone said it was overpowered and then it got nerfed into oblivion. Instead of the developers having their own plan they clearly had no clue. People whining that Jedi was too hard... well guess what it's meant to be hard! However the devs gave in to the constant forum whiners and ruined the game some more. People whining about travel taking so long which was a balance feature for the game and oh guess what they ruined the game some more with instant travel.
It seems like it's only getting worse I mean look how how the Champions Online community just keeps on whining. I mean guess what mmorpgs have problems at launch... I've never known one not to so stop whining and get over it. You ain't suffered unless you played SWG where every patch got pushed onto live without testing fixing 1 thing and breaking 20. That was caused by the constant noise of the forums over shadowing the good posts. See in theory people want stuff like decay and death penalties, but when you give it to them they'll whine that the games too hard.
 
I'm just so fedup of official forums for mmorpgs because they'd do better without them.

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Champions online is a good idea poorly executed. I'd bitch too if I had been duped into buying it. Especially if after playing the headstart weekend to get a 'headstart' they nerfed all my character's best powers effectively making me roll a new character all over again.

As for SWG, I felt it was a boring game that many people treated like it was a second life. More people played that game to craft and gold farm than anything else. It just didn't appeal to a wide audience and SOE had too much invested in the game to just sit idly by with less than half of their projected subscribers. So they did what they thought would encourage more people to play. Unfortunately this was a big mistake on their part as they spent even more money on advertising that failed to bring in new customers and the changes they made caused them to lose many of those who enjoyed the game as it was.

In neither case is it the 'whiners' on the forums that caused the problems.

I agree that devs should have classes balanced by launch time and not screw around with them just because some people are complaining. Just because a class seems OP in a certain situation doesn't necessarily mean that it's unbalanced.

Originally posted by Fkinglinux

Just curious, but in your mind, what is the difference between whining and a valid complaint?

whining = "I can't kill X class with my Y class, X is too strong!!!!!"  "I can't solo X boss, its too hard and I don't have time to figure out how to kill it!!!"  "Item Z quests take too long to complete, no other person has enough time after work to do this! I pay so I want!!!!"

valid complaint = "Whenever I walk over a certain bridge to get to X town I fall through and get stuck please fix it!"

Originally posted by bonobotheory

Originally posted by Fkinglinux

Just curious, but in your mind, what is the difference between whining and a valid complaint?

 

Complaint I agree with = Valid complaint.

Complaint I disagree with = Pathetic whining.

That's how it works on these Internets.

LOL QFT 

By the way, for the OP, if companies stop listening to the "whining forums", they are accused of not listening to their playerbase.  So as you can see, either way, they're screwed and criticized.

Originally posted by Briansho

Originally posted by Fkinglinux

Just curious, but in your mind, what is the difference between whining and a valid complaint?

 

whining = "I can't kill X class with my Y class, X is too strong!!!!!"  "I can't solo X boss, its too hard and I don't have time to figure out how to kill it!!!"  "Item Z quests take too long to complete, no other person has enough time after work to do this! I pay so I want!!!!"

valid complaint = "Whenever I walk over a certain bridge to get to X town I fall through and get stuck please fix it!"

But..... what if X class is too strong vs class Y?  Are you saying developers shouldn't try to balance their games, esp PVP games?

What if quests (or raids) do take too long to complete, meaning few players actually ever experience the content.

What if Boss X is too hard, should it be left as is?

I'll agree, if developers listen to a small vocal minority about issues like these, they are probably making a mistake.

However, if a large portion of their target subsriber base agrees then perhaps the changes are warranted.

But how to know? 

SWG was changed because SOE/Lucas Arts could not believe that a Warhammer/LOTOR rip-off could garner millions of subscribers while their game with its "magnificent" IP was mired in the under 250 range.

They took a look at what made WOW successful, noticed that some of their users were asking for similar things, and made the (incorrect as it turns out) decision to try and WOWify their game.

Mythic did the same with DAOC, decided the game needed raiding like EQ for some reason, and it turned out to be the last thing most of the player base was looking for.

The MMORPG landscape is littered with bad decisions, sometimes as a result of listentng to player feedback, but in many cases the dev's came up with hairbrained schemes all on their own.

The sense of entitlement is strong in this thread.

Forum users know better than people who have published games and lived the life of devlopers in the game indistry.

News at 11.